Verizon Droid Turbo hands on: A giant battery with few tradeoffs

The Motorola-made phone packs a huge, 3,900-milliamp-hour (mAh) battery that’s rated to last 48 hours — two full days — of "mixed" use. That's almost 1,000mAh more than the iPhone 6 Plus, and about 800mAh more than the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

We won't know for sure whether Motorola's two-day-per-charge claim is true until we get a chance to do a thorough test, but the "monster" battery definitely has one noticeable effect: it makes the phone bigger.

Motorola Droid Turbo

Turbo Power

The Droid Turbo, starting at $199 with a two-year contract with Verizon, boasts a battery that's said to last up to 48 hours per charge.

Kevlar Back

Like previous Droids, the Turbo has a kevlar back in three patterns: metallic black, metallic red and a nylon weave.

Image: Luke Leonard/Mashable

Nylon

The ballistic nylon weave provides a unique texture.

Image: Luke Leonard/Mashable

Not Too Thick

To make room for the 3,900 milliamp-hour battery, the Droid Turbo is thicker than many other phones at 0.44 inches. However, it tapers down to 0.33 inch near the edge.

Image: Luke Leonard/Mashable

21MP Camera

The camera on the Droid Turbo shoots pics at 21 megapixels and can capture 4K video.

Image: Luke Leonard/Mashable

Quad HD

The display on the Droid Turbo is Quad HD, or 2,560 x 1,440, giving it a massive pixel density at more than 500 pixels per inch (ppi).

Image: Luke Leonard/Mashable

Turbo Case

Verizon is offering a special case for the Turbo that includes a window that allows interaction with the phone even when it's closed.

Image: Luke Leonard/Mashable

Droid Zap

Droid Zap lets users "flick" photos with two fingers to either share them to people nearby or send them to a Chromecast.

Image: Luke Leonard/Mashable

The Droid Turbo measures 0.44 inches at its thickest point, although it tapers down to 0.33 inches toward the edge. The aforementioned iPhone 6 Plus and Note 4 measure 0.28 inches and 0.33 inches, respectively. The Turbo is also on the hefty side, at 6.2 ounces, which is roughly the weight of those other, larger phones.

It's a tribute to Motorola's designers that the Droid Turbo doesn't feel like a plus-size phone. From a distance, it looks nearly identical to the 2014 Moto X — the kevlar backside being the main giveaway that this is a different phone. It's heavy for a 5.2-inch phone, but not egregiously so. If this is the design tradeoff for extra-long battery life, I say bring it on.

The Droid Ultra's other marquee feature is the Quad HD display. With 2,560 x 1,440 pixels, the screen has an ungodly 565 pixels per inch (ppi). Outside of using the phone as a virtual-reality display mere inches from your eyes, I don't know why you'd ever want a screen with so many pixels, but they're nice to have. Photos look gorgeous on the display, and the Snapdragon 805 processor, augmented by Adreno 420 graphics, keeps all the phone animation buttery smooth.

I don't much care for Motorola's camera interface, although I do like the gesture-based way to activate it: Just twist the phone side to side, and the camera will launch. It's not intuitive at first, but you get used to it.

The 21-megapixel rear camera takes great photos and — more importantly — it snaps them quickly. The camera's also capable of recording 4K-quality video, although, like the screen, the practical benefits are questionable. It's too bad the biggie battery didn't leave enough room inside for optical image stabilization, but you can't have everything.

A sample pic taken from the Droid Turbo's 21-megapixel camera.

Image: Mashable, Pete Pachal

Droid Zap, which Verizon introduced in last year's Droid phones, gets an upgrade in the Turbo. Zap is both hugely convenient and hugely weird — just swipe up with two fingers on any photo or video, and it's uploaded to the cloud, but only in your immediate area. That means only people near you (and running the Zap app) can download it.

With the Turbo, there's an upgrade: Now users can make the uploads more private by adding a PIN. Better still: Droid Zap is Google Cast compatible, meaning you can Zap photos and videos to a Chromecast, as long as you're on the same Wi-Fi network. That feature worked quickly and instantaneously for me — even with tons of active wireless devices in the room.

The ballistic nylon weave on the Droid Turbo.

Image: Mashable, Luke Leonard

I've always been a fan of the design of Verizon's Droid phones. The patterns Motorola chooses for the kevlar backside are cool (I particularly like the texture of the nylon), and the red one is bold without being silly-looking (*cough* Nokia *cough*).

Motorola definitely saved something special for Verizon Droid line, with the Turbo being technically superior in many ways to the brand's flagship phone, the Moto X. We'll wait and see if the battery really is as good as Moto says, but out of the gate the Droid Turbo shows the company has a strong sense of what people really want in a smartphone today.

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